World’s largest African poetry archive to empower Africans through culture and history

With work from over 350 poets across 24 countries, the project hopes to elevate the African voice in arts and culture.

African Arts and Culture

The first-ever African poetry archive is rewriting history and doing something that’s never been done before: collecting all of the continent’s vast and diverse writings into one corner of the Internet.

The Badilisha Poetry X-Change, a website launched in 2012 by the Africa Centre, an arts and culture organization in Cape Town, South Africa, has now archived the work of more than 350 poets in 24 countries across the continent. The collection is only growing, with two new poets featured on the website and via podcast each week. Last year, the site also launched a mobile app that lets users easily discover poets and listen to them on their smartphones.

“Badilisha was conceived to prioritize poetic African voices and ensure that Africans have the option of being inspired and influenced by their own poets,” Linda Kaoma, Badilisha’s project manager, told this month's issue of Poets & Writers magazine. “We want to offer our audience a holistic and multilayered experience of poetry.”

As Kaoma points out, despite the continent’s enormous population, only 2 percent of the world’s published books are by African authors. The archive hopes to change that—it organizes poets by name, country, language, and theme, and includes a photo, biography, and sound file of the poet reading his or her work in both the poet’s original language and in English. The archive now includes poems written in 14 different languages.

ADVERTISEMENT

“If you look at Europe, it’s very easy to find archives of many things, but in Africa, because a lot of history and culture was passed down by the oral tradition and there was lack of documentation, that’s not possible,” she previously told The Guardian shortly after the launch. “We didn’t want history to repeat itself.”

“We used to spend so much time agonizing over the question of whether we were writing for the West,” the Nigerian author Okey Ndibe has said. “In retrospect, I see our error. In Nigeria, we grew up reading the West. The West was talking to us. Why shouldn’t the West read Nigeria? Why shouldn’t we talk back?”

With the Badilisha Poetry X-Change, the world is getting unfiltered writing straight from Africa, by Africans, about Africa. The mobile app also takes advantage of the fact that most people in Africa use their phones to access the Internet; the poetry shared on the site mimics oral tradition by letting users listen to poetry read to them and also addresses the larger problem of getting poetry published.

For Kaoma and the Badilisha project, it’s less about attracting outside audiences than it is about empowering Africans to discover their own voices through culture and history.

Eyewitness? Submit your stories now via social or:

Email: eyewitness@pulse.com.gh

ADVERTISEMENT